They say charity begins at home. And while I applaud Bill Gates’ calls in Davos last week for a “kinder” capitalism that helps the needy, we would all do well to first examine how we treat our own employees – especially with a possibly nasty recession coming on.

Media and entertainment companies are prime offenders in that regard. The perceived glamour and scarcity of jobs in Hollywood and top news organizations mean management can get away with plenty.

We’re all familiar with the most obvious manifestations: screaming, tantrums and thrown objects are legendary in the media business and Hollywood. I was once woken up at 5 am to be screamed at for 20 minutes (along with correspondents in London and Tokyo) because an editor didn’t like a story. Production companies, studios and agencies routinely pay people less than $30,000 a year for 14 hour days.  

Then there are writers. (I plead guilty to extreme bias). In Hollywood, most writers have nearly no say in what happens to their creative product, and are considered interchangeable by directors. In journalism, “freelancers” are sometimes kept on staff for years, paid far less than other employees and denied benefits.

The current clash between writers and studios is a rare example of the creatives fighting back. It’s hard for me to fathom why somebody’s work for TV wouldn’t be worth compensating on the Internet and other emerging mediums.. Especially when the argument about the impact on profits is being advanced by executives making six or seven-figure incomes.

Can you imagine dreaming up a new video game and not being paid if it were transferred from a console to a computer?

And really…how is it possible to argue that kids shouldn’t rip off intellectual property on the Internet when you’re unwilling to fairly compensate the people who create it?

Posted under Michael's Blog

On a day when financial woes caused the Los Angeles Times to fire its editor and the Orange County Register to can its business section, I found myself thinking about Amazon’s Kindle.

The Kindle, you’ll recall, is an ebook that allows you to wirelessly download any of 90,000 books over a 3G cellular network — as well as news and views from the New York Times, Time, the Huffington Post and dozens of other outlets.

It’s essentially a computer that downloads stuff from the Internet, the same type of gadget journalists are always complaining is stealing away their business.

The main difference is form factor and readability. The Kindle is about the size of a paperbook book and uses a technology called electronic ink that gives a reader the sensation of reading words on a page.

It exemplifies the best of both worlds: the accessibility of the Internet; and a comfortable reading experience that no computer or PDA can match.

Admittedly, there are plenty of flaws in the first Kindle: monochrome, inability to surf the Internet, no video and a rather ugly design. But those flaws will surely be addressed in future versions of Kindles — and its soon-to-be numerous competitors.

For newspapers, the implications are huge. Their biggest threat, the Internet, is now their delivery boy. They can reach an infinite audience and they eliminate their huge newsprint costs. They can update stories instantly and add video.

Most importantly, the readability of an ebook (or perhaps better, a connected book) mean that the over-30 set, who could never imagine sipping a latte and watching their computer screen, will feel perfectly at home once they’ve gotten used to the novelty.

And even my kids would surely prefer connected books to booting up their computers or squinting at their PDAs every time they want to read something.

We’re talking about a 10 to 20 year span, I’d think, before connected books replace the printed page. But the writing, as they say, is on the wall.

See Also

• O.C. Register to Drop Its Business Section
• Why Los Angeles Times Can’t Keep an Editor

Posted under Uncategorized

Movie download services have been about to take off for nearly 20 years.

In the mid-1990s, Time Warner spent $10,000 a customer in Florida to show downloading movies over cable lines was technologically feasible. In 2008, movie downloads are still mired in the "proof-of-concept" stage.

Apple’s announced plans today for an online movie rental service could be the spark that sets movie downloads alight in consumers’ minds.

Not because Apple is offering a fundamentally new twist on VOD. But because it’s Apple.

The movie download market today is remarkably similar to where online music was before Apple launched its first iPod. Back then, MP3 players were already on the market. But they were largely niche products and most music that played on them was pirated. Apple created the first cool digital music player.

Steve Jobs was also the first technology executive with the heft in Hollywood to actually cut deals with studio executives to allow enough legal content online to create a marketplace — and demonstrate that making money from digital music was at least possible.

In 2008, most consumers still aren’t all that interested in cable companies’ movie download offerings — largely because the studios are so worried about piracy and cannibalizing their existing TV syndication and DVD businesses that they haven’t supplied enough product to interest subscribers.

Movie downloads from services like Netflix and CinemaNow are still largely a curiosity for hobbyists and people who don’t know how to download the pirated stuff. 

Until now, Apple hasn’t fared  that much better. It’s sold only about seven million movies, compared to about four billion songs and 125 million TV shows.

Once again, Jobs has persuaded the studios to make vastly greater stores of content available to consumers in exchange for the tacit promise that he can create enough of a market to offset the inevitable increase in piracy that will occur when millions of new consumers realize how easy it is to download and share movies on their computers, iPods and TV sets. (Just look at the movie piracy rate in Korea, which has the world’s most ubiquitous broadband).

Apple’s movie rental service could be exactly the spark Hollywood needs to jumpstart its online cinema business. Or the spark could become a conflagration that devours industry profits. Or it could flop once again, just as so many for-profit video-on-demand ventures have since Time Warner first dipped its toes in Orlando.

The only certainty is the movie downloads — legal or not — are here to stay.

See Also

• Apple Unveils Online Movie Rentals, Ultra-Thin Laptop Computer
• Time Warner’s ‘Time Machine’ for Future Video

Posted under Uncategorized